PAL, NTSC-U and NTSC-J for NZ collectors

14 October 2026

If you collect physical games in New Zealand you'll keep meeting three labels: PAL, NTSC-U and NTSC-J. They started as television standards and became shorthand for where a copy was made and sold. For a collector the practical question is simple: will this copy play on my console?

What the three codes mean

PAL is the region New Zealand and Australia share with Europe. Games sold new in New Zealand were almost always PAL copies, so a local console and a local copy match.
NTSC-U (sometimes NTSC-U/C) covers the United States and Canada.
NTSC-J covers Japan, and on some older systems other parts of Asia.

The glossary entry on region lock has the short version, and it's worth a look for the other terms you'll see on listings.

Which consoles care

Whether a region mismatch matters depends entirely on the system:

Region locked: the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, the GameCube and the Wii, the Nintendo 3DS, and the Nintendo 64 and Super Nintendo, where an import cartridge may not even fit without an adapter. A PAL console won't run an NTSC game without a modification or, on the older cartridge systems, a pass-through adapter.
Region free, or nearly: the Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance, the original Nintendo DS, the PlayStation 4 and the Nintendo Switch.
It depends on the game: on the Xbox 360 each publisher chose whether to lock a disc, and most PlayStation 3 games are region free with a few exceptions.

Region isn't a judgement about a copy. Plenty of collectors buy imports on purpose, for a Japanese cover, a game that never came out here, or simply a better price, and play them on a console from the same region.

How a game page here shows it

Every game has a page, and each release on it is listed by platform and region. When a New Zealand shop lists a copy, the page shows it under the release it matches. Two things are worth knowing:

We only record a region when the shop says one. If a shop's listing names a region, it's recorded per listing and shown under the shop's name. A shop that says nothing is left blank, never assumed to be PAL.
A copy from a region with no release on record gets its own group. If a shop lists, say, an NTSC-J copy of a game we only have a PAL release of on that platform, the page shows it in a separate group with a sentence explaining why, rather than counting it as another release.

Three pages where you can see that in action, as of 14 October 2026:

Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 2 on the PlayStation 2, with a Japanese copy.
Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures on the PlayStation 2, with an American copy.
Kinect Adventures on the Xbox 360, with an American copy.

Looking for imports on purpose?

The imports shelf collects copies New Zealand shops say are Japanese releases, and the in stock page lets you narrow everything currently available by platform. A game's page also lets you ask for an email when a copy turns up. An alert follows the releases on the page, so it can be limited to a region we have a release of, but an import of a region with no release on record here won't set one off: how stock alerts work.